West Japan: Successful Drone Trial Delivering Medicines Takes Place

Japan is anoth­er coun­try show­ing increased inter­est with drone deliv­ery and in late March a suc­cess­ful tri­al was car­ried out trans­port­ing med­i­cines, reports mainichi.jp. In a pre­fec­tur­al first, a live demon­stra­tion occurred at a uni­ver­si­ty in the city of Wakaya­ma.

The project was the ini­tia­tive of KSK Co, a med­ical and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals whole­sale com­pa­ny, locat­ed in the city of Osa­ka. What par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­ests the com­pa­ny is the capa­bil­i­ty of deliv­er­ing health­care and med­i­cines by air when streets are dis­rupt­ed by large-scale dis­as­ters. The com­pa­ny used drones pro­vid­ed by Toky­o’s NTT Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in tan­dem with the Wakaya­ma Med­ical Uni­ver­si­ty.

An offi­cial receives med­ical sup­plies from a drone after his iden­ti­fy is ver­i­fied through facial recog­ni­tion at Wakaya­ma Med­ical Uni­ver­si­ty (Mainichi/Atsuhisa Kato)

Masa­mi Ueno, advis­er to the Pres­i­dent at Wakaya­ma Med­ical Uni­ver­si­ty, com­ment­ed, “It is not just about deliv­er­ing health­care items dur­ing local dis­as­ters, but also for the elder­ly liv­ing alone or those resid­ing in moun­tain­ous loca­tions.”

Dur­ing the tri­al flight on March 30th, the drone was tasked with car­ry­ing ‘tem­per­a­ture-reg­u­lat­ed’ med­i­cines. The craft took off from Wak­a­gawa Kasen Park’s ten­nis courts, about 1.5 kilo­me­tres from the Med­ical Uni­ver­si­ty, with the health prod­ucts inside a cold-stor­age box. Util­is­ing Lev­el 2 flight, in which the drone flies autonomous­ly with­in the oper­a­tor’s line of sight, the craft land­ed on top of the uni­ver­si­ty’s library build­ing around 20 min­utes lat­er. After an offi­cial’s iden­ti­ty was ver­i­fied using its facial-recog­ni­tion cam­era, the drone released the med­i­cines.

Vibra­tion and oth­er data from this flight is to be analysed to iden­ti­fy chal­lenges ahead. In sub­se­quent exper­i­ments, researchers plan to move up to oth­er flight lev­els, includ­ing fly­ing BVLOS over pop­u­lat­ed areas.

Hiroshi Hiratani, head of logis­tics strat­e­gy at KSK, said after the exper­i­ment, “We’ve proven that drones can suc­cess­ful­ly make deliv­er­ies. We are aim­ing for Lev­el 4 flights by 2025.”

Wakaya­ma Uni­ver­si­ty

Of course, that is the year the six-month long Osa­ka Expo takes place where var­i­ous eVTOL and drone deliv­ery com­pa­nies will par­tic­i­pate. Japan’s Sky­Drive, a fly­ing taxi com­pa­ny, will take cen­tre stage.

Mean­while, last Decem­ber Japan revised its Civ­il Aero­nau­tics Act, allow­ing for “Lev­el 4” flights and the oper­a­tion of BVLOS (Beyond Visu­al Line of Sight) drones fly­ing over pop­u­lat­ed areas.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.ksk.co.jp/english/

https://www.wakayama‑u.ac.jp/en/

[Top image: A drone car­ry­ing a box of med­ical sup­plies in Wakaya­ma city: (Mainichi/Atsuhisa Kato)]